Michael Enis sits in a dark classroom with half a dozen other students gazing at images projected onto a screen. Worn-out certificates of birth and slavery flip past as instructor Felton Cogell clicks through various pages on Ancestry.com.

Finally the surfing stops at a line of Enis' ancestors from the British Isles. "Wow," Enis says, smiling and shaking his head. He is black and the faces on the screen are lily-white.

They're in the Western Addition Community Technology Center on Turk Street, and while there is a playground nearby, the students in Cogell's class are mostly older. The center teaches computer basics but also offers specialized classes like job-hunting online, using Photoshop, and researching ancestry.

"It's a big and welcome need - serves the community well," says student Vincent Louie, 71. He's researched his family's migrations from Asia, using resources from the tech lab to search public records in San Bruno. He's amassed a sprawling notebook of documentation.

The center is in a low-slung building across the street from the lush grass and towering eucalyptus trees inside Jefferson Square Park. Classes teach computing basics to all age ranges; Thetus Howell participated in Cogell's genealogy class and is 91.

But the center also provides local youths with academic help and allows free use of its computers to anyone. On a given afternoon a class or two will be in session while other rooms of the lab have folks checking e-mail or getting news. "A little less than half of the visitors are daily" users of the lab, notes administrative assistant Mary Rivers. But she points out that "a lot of it is job search."

Neighborhood benefits

Rev. Philip Cousin, the new senior pastor of neighboring Bethel A.M.E. and likely the next executive director of the lab, lauds the services but also notes the center can use all the volunteer help and donations it can get. Cogell, who is also the center's director, Rivers and two volunteers teach all the classes now.

Rivers says about 65 percent of the visitors are from the Western Addition, one of central San Francisco's transitional neighborhoods. Affordable housing mixes with expensive homes. The quainter streets of Hayes Valley are a few blocks to the south; the tougher streets of the Tenderloin are just a few to the east.

Genealogy seems a natural fit here. Understanding ancestry helps the neighborhood feel a part of history. Researchers can reach back and, in a sense, get to know former family members.

Navigating genealogy sites - Ancestry.com now has DNA testing options - can be arduous, especially to the less Internet-savvy. Wills, census and military records, birth and death certificates, and diaries are the guiding lights, but "you often run into roadblocks," notes Cogell. Conditions of history - natural disasters to draconian laws to fire - can mean entire branches of personal history are wiped from the books, literally.

Obstacles to searching

Louie notes that "with Asian names, it's even more confusing." Translating from foreign alphabets and pronunciations, which aren't always represented well with English letters, makes identifying the right lineages tricky.

Or take the effects of slavery. Under the horrid logic of the day, many states made reading to slaves, and teaching slaves to read, illegal. More than a century and a half later, that means there are far fewer records about those relatives to upload and find online. Many African Americans conducting searches hit impassable roadblocks in the 1860s.

With help from Cogell and his own sleuthing, Enis (which historically has also been spelled with two Ns) has been able to pull back some of the curtain on his family tree. Enis was raised by his grandparents in rural Alabama in the 1950s and recalls stories his grandfather told him about rowdy Wild Bill Enis, who terrorized neighbors when he drank too much.

Now that Enis has done the research, he knows his great-grandfather Buck Enis, but it is not clear exactly how Wild Bill is related. He could be his great-great-grandfather, he could be a slave owner or he could be both. "It's amazing how these things just keep going and going," Enis says. "There's a lot more work I have to do."

Regardless, it was a big moment when Wild Bill's face appeared on the monitor while he was searching. "I couldn't believe it," Enis says.